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SATA ROUNDUP - 160 GB

<P><EM>"We'll begin this harddrive review just as we did the last one, we've been inactive in covering the storage section for some time now, but now comes the time to change that. As a preview of what you're about to see today I can tell you we're about to have a closer look at a couple of mainstream harddrives using the SATA interface. We're talking about drives with 160 GB capacity, 7200 rpm speed and 8 MB cache. Harddrives with 120 GB storage capacity have long been the standard and most bang for the buck (most GB/penny) but disks with 160 GB capacity have taken that lead and today we thought we'd do a straight forward shoot-out in this price range."</EM></P>
<P>That pretty much says it all. </P>
<P>http//www.nordichardware.com/reviews/storage/2004/SATA_ROUNDUPWatch how your favourite brand stands up to the competition in our review here</A>.</P>
<nobrs><nosmile><nosmile>

I personally prefer Seagate, because they are more reliable (from experience). I've had bad experiences with WD in the past (no indication of today's products though). Otherwise I'd never use an Hitachi, but I'd consider a Maxtor, if stuck.

I was surprised to see "AAM can't be changed" on the Seagate, but I can see the point. I learned something... I didn't know about the noise levels (I'm old school, so I don't care about noise ).

Personally I'll stick with Samsung. We found a failure rate of 1 in 50 drives making them the most reliable drives we have tried. They are also virtually silent which is reflected in them being a recommended product at SilentPCReview. See http://www.silentpcreview.com/article29-page1.html for more details.

We found an average failure rate of 1 in 35 Seagate drives we used in systems. Western Digital wasn't much better.

Hitachi's reliabillity has carried over from the IBM DeskStar drives they are based on, horrendous. Fortunately their performance is still top notch. They're about as noisy as the Maxtor drives though.

Maxtor's reliabillity and performance is, as always good. They are far too noisy for my taste.

When it comes to drive noise, the only two options are Samsung and Seagate.

The thing to remember is that historically, Samsung only made high end SCSI hard drives. Now that they've started making consumer level drives, their experience in making high performing and reliable drives seems to show. This explains why they're such an unknown brand with consumer hard drives to most people. They also offer a 3 year warranty on all of their hard drives as standard.

Ignore any synthetic benchmark results, the only results that matter are the real world tests.

As you imply our non-synthetic tests shows that the Samsung drive was the fastest drive when it came to copying and moving data on the same partition.

I've had some really bad experience with IBM drives, and according to the returns I've seen Hitachi aint much better...

Maxtor forever Noise can be isolated ;P

I'm agreeing with you on Hitachi, as per my previous post where I stated their reliabillity is horrendous. But I'll also stick with my statement about the Samsung drives being the most reliable drives we've used.

I seriously dislike being able to tell that a computer is turned on by its noise. I prefer to have to look and see if the LED is on at the front of the case. Silent computing is great.

I got tired of noisy systems a long time ago. I now try to compromise between performance and quiet components. The parts you need to be careful with on this are the PSU, case fans, CPU HSF, and the HDD....

Yes, noise can be isolated, but almost every way of quietening a HDD I have seen results in the drive running hotter. I'd sooner just choose a drive thats quiet in the first place. In the case of Samsung there's no compromise anyway, they're fast, quiet, and reliable. They also have a 3 year warranty as standard. Whats not to like? 8)

Hmmmm, I think I now see your point. Not everyone cares about noise...... :shock:

Totally depends on the use of the computer. Today I use a Shuttle SB75G system, which is very quiet. I've taken my "old" 250GB Maxline II drives and put them in cabinetts to use outside of the sff . Inside I got a Samsung (I think?) 160 GB

It is very quiet, but I'm actually thinking of replacing the fan on teh I.C.E.-cooling to a lower-RPM version. I have no troubles with heat (got a Pentium 4 with the m0-stepping ) thus an experiment might be nice. We'll see.

Very, very nice. Have you taken a look at Vantec's case fan cooling kits?

They use a silica gel frame to stop vibrations from the fan. This doesn't stop the noise, though it does lower the pitch of the fan. They also come with 8x silica gell washers. I'd use these on the HDD and CD drive to stop vibration.....

Go to http://www.vantecusa.com/ and look under the accessories section.....